Skip to main content

Nigamon/Tunai

The Studio

Four stars

 

Water is everywhere in this remarkable collaboration between indigenous artists from North and South America, which charts how the planet’s natural resources are plundered and entire ecosystems destroyed in the name of greed. From Canada, and with Anishinabe and French roots, Émilie Monnet stands side by side with Waira Nina, who is Inga, and from the Colombian Amazon. The title of the play in each of their respective languages means ‘song’, and this is exactly what emerges over this ninety-minute work that is part sound installation, part durational ritual.

 

The audience are seated on cushions around rock pools and foliage in a fully immersive unspoilt idyll. Monnet and Nina move in and around this, utilising sound baths drawn from the natural environment. The pair caw and spar as they re-enact birdsong. They pile rock on top of rock in a room where even the hot air itself seems to breathe.

 

When the sound of machines invades the air, however, that idyll is torn in two, and the old ways are threatened out of existence. As the voices of a radio commentary make clear in an otherwise largely wordless construction, the mining of precious copper will upset the entire ecosystem, and the world will change forever.

 

This makes for a haunting meditation by Monnet and Nina, who use sound and vision in a purely holistic but utterly committed way that seems to cross continents and oceans in a slow burning declaration of solidarity. Working with a small army of designers across all disciplines, Monnet and Nina have created a work of total beauty that manages to be both profound and provocative in intent.

 

Julie Christina Picher’s all encompassing set design is a wonder in itself, lit with a sense of shimmering transcendence by Chantal Labonté. A sound team led by Frannie Holderand Frédéric Auger pulse the show’s mesmeric drive in what evolves into an urgent sonic poem. Produced by a trio of Montreal based organisations -Productions ONISHKA, Festival TransAmériques and Espace GO – Monnet and Nina’s vital collaboration suggests there may be hope yet for the global village we inhabit.


The Herald, August 19th 2024

 

ends

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more